He died in an outburst of majority resentment, punctuated by heat-beams. Newlin returned behind the counter and buzzed for Careld's stand-in. Then clutching the girl's arm, he left the place, dragging her along.
The street was dim, silent, deserted. "Where to?" asked Newlin.
Her quick nod indicated direction.
"Walking distance?" he persisted. "Inside the city? If not, I'll have to get protection suits from a public locker."
"Just inside. Monta Park."
Newlin whistled. "Nice neighborhood. Do you live there?"
"No," she faltered. "I'm just in from—Earth."
Earth! It was a long time since Newlin had seen Earth. Few of his memories were pleasantly nostalgic. Born there, in the poorest quarter of the international spaceport of Sahara City, his early life had been hard. Both parents had died there, broken from strain and poverty, and Newlin escaped only by stowing away in the dangerous after-holds of a rocketship bound for Mars, risking the unpleasant death from leaking radioactives in preference to being poor on Earth.
He had been poor since, in many places, but never with the grinding hopelessness of those early nightmare years. Their mark stayed with him and colored his life. He knew every rathole of the system, with the same intimacy the rats knew them. Once, on a non-stop express rocket from Mars to Pluto, he had lost a finger and all the toes from his left foot in ceaseless guerilla warfare with rats which had disputed possession of the hold in which he stowed away. More than once he had bummed passage near the atomic fuel vats of cranky old space-freighters that were mere tin cans caulked with chewing gum. As boy and man, he slept in jails from the dark, mad moons of Neptune to the fiery beach-head colonies of Mercury. And with fists, brain and nimble fingers he had written an epic biography in Security Police annals.